Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Signal Hill.
The government has been talking a lot about the middle class lately. In fact, it put a chart in the budget to make a point about the relative incomes of middle-class people in order to make an illustration of their incomes and how they have been affected by the last 40 years. The Liberals' chart on page 11 demonstrates incomes for middle-class people over the last four decades and they have made the claim that middle-class people have had almost no raise in four decades.
I thought, “That can't be possible”, because all the data that I studied from the last decade alone had demonstrated that incomes had gone up, and gone up dramatically. I filed an ATIP request and asked the finance department to provide me with the underlying data that it used to produce this chart showing that middle-class incomes are roughly where they were 40 years ago.
Is it possible that the budget, which shows no increase in middle-class incomes over the last four decades, and previous Conservative claims that show incomes have risen dramatically in the last 10 years, alone, could both be true?
The reality is they are. Liberals who say there have been no increases in middle-class incomes over four decades are basically right, and Conservatives who say middle-class incomes went up dramatically in the last decade alone are also right.
How is that possible?
I drilled down into the data and I got from Finance Canada the data used in the Liberal budget. Here is what I found.
If we look back to 1976, which is the starting point of this Liberal chart in the budget, we find that the median income for a Canadian was $46,300. That was under the first Prime Minister Trudeau, but in the following seven years, they dropped by $2,800, down to $43,500. It then took 30 years to recover the incomes lost during the Trudeau era. It was not until 2007 when incomes would return to $46,400.
Just to recap, in 1976, incomes were $46,300. They plummeted during the Trudeau government, until 1983. It then took decades to recover the lost income that was suffered as a result of those policies. This data comes right out of the Liberal budget and it shows the damage to middle-class incomes that resulted from the policies of spiralling debt, rising taxes, and handouts to big corporations.
What do we have now? Spiralling debt, rising taxes, and handouts to big corporations. The very policies that led to the income declines witnessed in the Liberal budget chart are now being repeated by the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
However, I wanted to study the chart a little further to find out what it would tell us about the most recent Conservative prime minister who just left office last November. According to the Liberal budget, in inflation-adjusted dollars, median incomes grew from $44,700 when he took office, to $49,602 in the year that he left office. That is an increase of $5,000, or 11%, after inflation.
Again, this is according to Liberal budget data. That is the largest increase in median incomes in 40 years. In fact, incomes under our recent Conservative prime minister grew more than under prime ministers Trudeau, Clark, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, and Martin combined, according to the Liberal budget data.
Among whom did this increase occur? The biggest increase happened for women. Women in the workforce, working on average 30 hours or more per week, saw their incomes go up, after inflation, by $5,234 during the leadership of the previous Conservative prime minister. That is a 14% increase in income after inflation.
My colleagues across the way will say that this is just a long-term demographic trend and it is nothing unusual. In fact, it is true that female incomes have risen under all governments in the last 40 years. However, none comes even close to the increases that occurred during the leadership of the previous Conservative prime minister. In fact, the growth rate for women's median income was five times higher under the most recent Conservative prime minister than it was under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and also five times higher than it was under prime ministers Chrétien and Martin.
This is data that comes out of the Liberal budget. To see it, one can go to page 11 and find the reality of middle-income growth and how it was successfully increased by the previous government.
I will be overlaying the Liberal budget chart with a very helpful chronological reminder of which prime ministers were in office when the incomes were earned. In so doing, we will see which governments have done best to produce results for median income people.
How did this happen? During the previous Conservative government, we introduced a number of key tax reductions designed specifically to help the less fortunate and the middle class. According to a report conducted by the independent, non-partisan parliamentary budget officer, Conservative tax reductions amounted to just over $30 billion a year. According to the PBO, these tax reductions were disproportionately targeted at low and middle-income families. They included the registered disability savings plan, which Jim Flaherty set up to help families give financial independence to their disabled children; the tax-free savings accounts to help people, who did not have a lot of money to buy real estate or RRSPs, save tax-free into the future, with two-thirds of those who maxed out their TFSAs making less than $60,000 a year.
We raised the personal exemption to take hundreds of thousands of low-income aspiring workers off the tax rolls so they could keep more of what they earned. We brought in the working income tax credit, which accelerated earned income so people were always better off when they worked than when they were on welfare. We scaled back unnecessary bureaucratic spending. We reduced the size of government as a share of the economy to its lowest level in half a century, which lifted the burden of expensive government off the shoulders of the working poor.
I am proud to say that according to the most recent data, when our Conservative government was in power, the poverty rate had dropped to its lowest level since it was recorded. This was a government that moved people into the middle class and moved the middle class up.
That is why we will continue to fight for the people who work hard, pay their taxes, and play by the rules, those who are not part of the insider economy and who do not get bailouts and handouts, because they cannot afford the lobbyists to acquire those bailouts and handouts.
We will be on the side of the underdogs, as we have always been. As the data have shown, we have helped them move up, and we will continue to fight so that they have a fair chance to do so in the future.